Hardscrabble FarmerHardscrabble Farmer: My life is not a work of fiction.
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Thu, 21 Jun 2018 06:58:31 -0500Thu, 21 Jun 2018 06:58:31 -0500Jekyll v2.4.0Words<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dNYX_ZhWL_E?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>“First learn the meaning of what you say, then speak.”<br />
-Epictetus</p>
<p>I’ve been writing these essays about the farm life for almost ten years now. Before that I posted a lot of work anonymously in numerous forums, and before that I wrote under my own name; short stories, articles for third tier publications, jokes and two aborted attempts at The Great American Novel that occupy the better part of an old cardboard banana box and the hard drive of a Compaq laptop that hasn’t been turned on in over a decade. Looking back at the body of work I’ve produced has been a revelation of sorts. All that time and effort to turn thoughts into words, and for what exactly? The old cliché about insanity — doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result — comes to mind, but I think that all the hours has had a much different effect. </p>
<p>When I was 10 years old I recall vividly coming home from school one day in the middle of Winter and writing a dirty limerick on a bedside notebook I’d gotten as gift for Christmas. I don’t remember where I heard it and I know that I didn’t fully understand what it meant at the time, but something propelled me to put the words down in pen and ink on paper. The opening lines are as memorable to me now as they likely were then, “In days of old when knights were bold…” and even as I wrote it I felt a weight lifted off my young shoulders. My mother discovered the childish scrawl the following morning and confronted me to my shock and embarrassment and then forgave me for that act of…what exactly? I certainly didn’t understand then the power of those words in my unformed mind, or the release of getting them out of it, if only symbolically in crooked letters, but it has stayed with me all these years.</p>
<p>The other day as I was finishing up the last of the maple syrup orders — more on that in a moment — The Colonel drove up and parked by the garage barn. He got out and as I wiped up my hands and headed over to see what was up I noticed a look on his face that was dark and severe. I suspected trouble but called out to him in a normal tone. When he approached I could see how upset he was and I knew instantly it was because of something I had done. We’ve been friends long enough for me to sense the anxiety in his visit I stopped in my tracks and waited for him to address what I could have avoided. Over the past few years as he has gotten older I have taken on a few of the tasks around his place that are just too much for him to handle any longer; mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges, plowing his driveway when it snows. Spring has gotten the best of me this year and I had spent the better part of every day deep in the weeds, between fulfilling orders that were in some cases three months old to rebuilding a fence line I’d left unfinished back in December when the ground had frozen solid. There was no excuse for not fulfilling the promise I had made to him and even though we never exchange money it was an assurance I’d made and until the past few weeks kept. He expressed his disappointment in me and said that it was something he hadn’t expected, me not keeping my word, and as he went on I stood silent and took his rebuke, hands at my sides and eyes on the ground. Before he turned to leave he said one thing that stung me — “I don’t want to hear your excuse” and so I remained mute, even as he turned and walked away, got in his car and drove off without a goodbye. I found it hard to continue my work after that and my evening was filled with disquiet. I’d let him down by not mowing the lawn, that was true, but what had bothered him to the point of coming up to chew me out was that I had given my word and now he knew how much that had meant. That night was one of troubled sleep and the next morning after chores I loaded the mower and weed whip into the trailer and took my sons with me to The Colonel’s place up on the mountain. I was half expecting him to tell me to get the hell off of his yard when I got there but I knew from experience that I had to at least make the effort, to make good on what I’d committed to and I wanted my sons to see not only my contrition, but how to correct a mistake rather than to let it slide. The Colonel came out of his house and stood in the driveway as I walked up. The lawn was overgrown and there were branches down on the edge of the property and I knew just how he must have felt to see that every morning. As I approached he straightened up and stood at attention and rendered me a salute, crisp as if he were still in uniform. I returned it and in that moment I could see that his chin was quivering and that there was a deep sadness in his eyes. I know that my family and I are not his only friends, but we matter a great deal to him. He’s taught my children how to play tennis and brings them magazines and books that fit their current interests almost every time he visits. There is not only the commonality of our service — we both served in the 82nd Airborne at roughly the same time and often share stories and anecdotes about our experience — but something deeper, a fellow feeling that some people have that tell them they are part of the same tribe. I could see on his face that he’d had a rough night too and after a sincere apology on my part we shook hands and he allowed me the opportunity to make right what I’d done wrong, to keep my word.</p>
<p>This year was one of the best we’ve had with the maple syrup. I had twice as many orders as I had the year before and it was about as good as any we’d ever made. I feel like we’re starting to get a grasp on the complexity of the process and we’ve learned a lot of tricks to make it every bit as fun as it was the first time; every bit as magical and rewarding with fewer mistakes and hiccups than in the past. Bottling and boxing are the choke points and this year it was far more daunting, especially when we offered the cured meats as an almost offhand extra. I can’t say I’ll try and repeat the effort without some serious thoughts of outsourcing the product fulfillment, hopefully to my children. I still have six boxes packed and sitting on a shelf in the sugarhouse, contents noted on the outside and no mailing label to go with them. If you are one of those readers who requested an order and found that it has yet to come and can still manage to grant me forgiveness for my oversight I will ship the box out promptly. If you are one of those who already received yours we thank-you sincerely. Each morning when we make the trip to the Post Office I find myself opening the handwritten envelopes with something approximating childish glee, not because there are checks or FRN’s enclosed, but because of the notes within. I read the words that people took the time to write to me with a smile on my face and the ladies that work there always comment on how happy they are when they place the letters in our box knowing what we’re getting back. This year I received so many unusual and thoughtful gifts, homemade preserves and chili sauce, fresh roasted coffee beans and a beautiful hand turned bird’s eye maple conductor’s baton. A subscription to what is now my favorite magazine, several books written by the same people who enjoy what I write and which now line my shelves. I received an especially beautiful monograph landscape by an artist who somehow captured the light of our fields in his studio two thousand miles away, and it hangs on the wall right across from where I write each morning. Of all these gifts and offerings the thing I can’t help but notice just how meaningful the words written on the craft paper and note cards are, how they have the power to bring up my spirits every time and send me back to whatever it is that is on my plate with a smile on my face and feeling that some kind of connection has been made with people I will never meet. I keep them all in bundles tied with baling string in an old trunk and if I ever feel like the day is more than I can stand up to, I open that box and sit for a bit and re-read them again to remind myself that there are far more good people out there than any other kind even if it seems that all the focus is on what’s gone wrong.</p>
<p>I rose up early this morning to catch the sunrise from the terrace. The sky began to lighten at 3:30, the color of lead against the fading blue-black of space. I made my coffee and went out and stood with the dogs watching the steam rise up from the trout pond and saw the gold come up in the east, ragged tatters of clouds sliding to meet the Sun. The ducks walked up the driveway in file murmuring to themselves and the new bull criss-crossed the paddock over and over while we stood there. To the left of the house in the distance Mount Kearsarge stood against the backdrop of dawn, and for just a moment the Sun held beneath the edge of the far treeline and then appeared. Summer. I turned back towards the west and watched as the sweep of color rose against the trees and the fields and the bull stood motionless regarding the sunrise just as we had, that ephemeral moment in time that marked not only the zenith, but the procession back towards the darkness. And so I came back in and sat down to write this, one word after another, as close to what I wanted to say as I am likely to get.</p>
<p>Words have an effect and once they are let loose there is no taking them back. When you are younger you are far more apt to say things without first considering the long term effects, but over time you slowly figure out that some things are best left unsaid. And so I keep a great deal in, the things I ruminate on, and before I let them loose I try and craft them into something that will approximate the truth as I understand it. I do not wish to do much more than record the passing of the years as we experience them on this piece of land in a place removed from epic struggles of our time, but what I try to do is to represent as closely as I am able the way that these moments unfurl. Sometimes the things I have said have missed their mark, or failed to keep my actions to their account. Promises made have been broken, but with the right frame and a commitment, they have been cobbled back together into something that will do and sometimes that is all you have. What I have learned is that just as it is with sailing, we have to constantly change our tack if we wish to reach our destination, judging the direction of our travel by reckoning, zig-zagging back and forth to reach whatever it is that we think we are heading towards, one word at a time.</p>
Thu, 21 Jun 2018 06:34:46 -0500https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2018/06/21/words/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2018/06/21/words/An Abundance of Shoots<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/GYwHxtNvO7M?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>We have finally completed bottling the syrup we made this year and the first shipments have already gone out. For the rest of this week we will be assembling the boxes and filling the order and making the run into town to visit the Post Office so that the things we have been working on in our small corner of New Hampshire will be enjoyed by people thousands of miles away. In the past few years we worked on the honor system where you emailed or phoned in your order and we put the names on a list and sent out the syrup with a note tucked inside and waited for the return mail to come… It was like a second Christmas for us, the checks and FRN’s tucked into envelopes with addresses from all fifty states and the kind notes thanking us for the syrup and even for the writing. On occasion there would be extras tucked in with the payment; homemade preserves from Indiana, honey from Florida, Coffee from Texas, pine nuts from New Mexico, dried herbs from a garden in California, a beautiful German steel knife from the Pacific Northwest, the complete poems of Emily Dickinson from South Carolina, handmade note paper from Minnesota, arrowheads from the Ohio River valley. As I opened each one in the evening with the kids we’d read the notes and letters out loud and then save them in bundles to read again and really enjoy the exchange between people who have never met, the sincere appreciation that has gone out of most economic transactions in the modern world. I was at first embarrassed by the wood shavings I used to fill the boxes with as packing to protect the bottled syrup because we couldn’t afford the packing peanuts but then I read the comments from people who loved the fact that when they opened the box the scent of pine would rise from the package. One customer sent me pictures of his fire starters he had made from the excelsior mixed with wax and poured into egg cartons. We trusted in the people we sent our syrup to because we understand that most people are good and if they were reading the blog we had to at least assume that they knew what we put into our work and wouldn’t take advantage of that fact. We knew that there might be a few who might forget to send the payment back — our invoices being half sheets of lined paper with handwritten instructions (apologies for my scrawl for those forced to decipher it) but this happened very few times over the years and in fact enough people sent something extra as a thanks for the stories that it more than made up for the difference. I understand that this practice isn’t one that can be copied by a real business, but what we do was never meant to be an industry, but a labor of love. This year a lot of people practiced a reverse honor system mailing out checks in advance and their carefully written orders. That put an unexpected windfall into our hands early in the season that allowed us to purchase all of our bottling supplies and some new lines for the sugar bush and it gave us a strangely powerful reason to go the extra mile with the season. Most years there is no expectation of what the harvest may bring. An early Spring can catch you off guard and the season can come to end before the tapping has been completed. This happened before and we did everything we could to get an early jump on the season. This year the sap ran for much longer than it has in the past with cold nights lingering until the end of April and frequent snows that almost buried the taps and lines during the month of March. We would collect the sap every day it ran and boil until we couldn’t stand up straight, often coming inside well after dark smelling of maple sugar and wood smoke. </p>
<p>It was a very long Winter and late Spring besides and it brought a great deal to our table that we did our best to fit into our lives. My Uncle passed away in the middle of the sugaring and my youngest son and I left the farm under the care of my wife and our oldest son so that we could return to New Jersey for the funeral. It was a trip I didn’t want to take for a lot of reasons, but as with all difficult things in life it was filled with unexpected rewards that helped to remind me of what is important in life. I was pall bearer for my Uncle’s funeral and I understood the importance of that charge as we lifted him to his grave. It was a brisk but sunny day and there were small armies of white clouds that rolled across the landscape and vanished into the distance like our lives. He was a veteran and so a detail was on hand to fold the flag that draped his coffin and at the end a bugler played taps as perfectly as I have ever heard it. In the same instant that the last note fell away in the breeze a train entered the far end of the valley and blew its own horn, twice as it always has in my memory and the sound echoed along the flank of Sourland Mountain as if to say farewell. We buried him on the same hillside where my Mother was laid to rest and the generations of my family going back to the years before there was even a nation called the USA and after the ceremony was over I made sure to take my son around to the headstones of the ones he could recall and to the cenotaphs of the ones who never came back, from places like Kasserine Pass and Mayre’s Heights. We ate and we drank together as a family and we talked and reaffirmed our connections to one another and I walked through my hometown, haunted it seemed with memories of the past and recognizable under the veneer of development and the ubiquitous lawn signs that proclaimed “Hate Has No Home Here” in English, Spanish and Arabic. I joked that neither did anyone with an income of less than 300K, but that was sardonic and pointless and more a sign of my regret for having left than anything else. My family, in their multitude of earthly dwellings spread across the cemetery on the hillside were not there, but alive in our memories so I neither left them behind when we moved to New Hampshire, nor stopped thinking about them. As we made our long drive north and returned home I felt buoyed by the connection to the living as well as to the succor of the passed.</p>
<p>In September I made a prediction that this was going to be a long Winter and I was right about that. I have paid close attention to the signs that nature leaves for us in these past few years and I understood that the profusion of polynoses was an indicator of what was to come. I forgot, however, that it meant something was coming after that and in the past few days there has been an abundance of shoots coming up through the carpet of loam that lays beneath the trees. Tens, hundreds of thousands of maple seedlings emerging from every declivity and furrow, numbers that boggle the mind when you think of how few will actually make it to the stately trees that list towards the sun on the side of the mountain where we live. When I point them out to some of the other farmers around here they stop in their tracks and look down, eyes wide and pronounce, “I have never…”</p>
<p>I understand now that the trees — as amazing as it may sound — know what is coming and make preparations for the future in a way that even human beings miss. I have tried to learn from the things we do here to better prepare for whatever is coming and most of the best lessons come from the simple observations of day to day life. We came through this season with a great deal to be grateful for. Last month my wife and daughter escaped harm when their car was totaled by a logging truck and even the local police and rescue workers stood in awe of the luck, the almost miracle that they were able to walk away without so much as a scratch and I stood next to them on the side of the road holding them both as tightly as I could manage, our eyes squeezed shut against the morning Sun and something else, aware of the value of each moment we share and glad to be able to live another day. We pulled porcupine quills from the muzzle of the youngest dog, delivered calves and farrowed three litters of piglets. We’ve turned the gardens, made the syrup, cured the meats, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, pulled all the manure beds into heaping windrows along the top of the eskar and taken to our beds to sleep peacefully. In our own way we are dropping our own seeds here and there for another future that we may not even realize is coming our way.</p>
<p>It has been a while since I have written anything of substance because I was learning so much this past several months about things I’d never considered before, but I feel that there are stories that may come out of it. This isn’t the kind of thing I have written before but I wanted everyone to know that the shipments are going out at last — thank-you for your patience — that the payoff is emerging from the investment and that like everything else in the world there is return to something green, and sweet, and full of light. And more importantly to thank everyone who has given us encouragement, offered their prayers, written a kind word and paid for their syrup in advance that we appreciate it more than you will ever know.</p>
Thu, 03 May 2018 07:46:10 -0500https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2018/05/03/an-abundance-of-shoots/
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<p>When it snows up here I plow a route for a friend. There’s a dozen or so places at various points around the lake, most of them tricky with steep, winding driveways, and difficult approaches. It may be why he’s given them to me instead of the other, younger drivers who plow the big parking lots and the commercial properties around the lake. He knows that I take my time with each one, that I am by nature a cautious man who likes to leave things just so and he knows that no one will call in to complain about the narrow paths shoveled to the door or some bed of flowers that’s been accidentally driven over. I mark out the route in the Fall before the ground freezes by driving wooden stakes into the edges of the driveway that let me know where I can pass safely and I write my notes about things like fuel tanks and access to the generators that all the big places have these days. I drop off five gallon pails of granite dust and sand to spread along the sidewalks, concrete aprons and porches. I rarely speak to the homeowners, most of them live somewhere else during the winter months, but if I do happen to see one I make it a point to ask their preferences and make sure to jot it down. People can be particular and once the first snow falls it’s too late to try and figure out where things are under a blanket of white. I have been fortunate this year to have my oldest son back with us and he rides along with me in the truck, jumping out to shovel while I make the passes over and over again to push all the snow back and clean up the drives and parking areas. One of the things we’ve made a point to do before each storm is to carefully check out the truck and the things we carry with us the night before; fluid levels and hoses are examined and topped off and made tight, we test the blade and the hydraulic connections and we load extra pails of sand into the bed along with a flat shovel, two snow shovels, a roof rake, chains and bars. I keep a couple of 2x12’s for emergencies and make sure the tires and lights are good. Inside the cab there’s always a couple of tow straps, a first aid kit, extra gloves, a blanket and a box of flares. I learned a few years back that an extra set of wiper blades is nice to carry along as well so there’s always one tucked behind the seat. We take along a thermos of hot coffee and a bag of sandwiches and jerky and my wife almost always packs a few snacks extra to carry us through if it’s an especially long night.</p>
<p>I had never driven a plow truck before we moved up here and so I learned it on my own by taking care of our own driveway and the farm roads. I made all of my mistakes on our own property over the course a several years before I tried my hand at someone else’s, but as with all skills I became better with each passing year, learning tricks that not only cut time off of the effort, but which prepared each property for the snows to come. Plowing is a lot more like sculpture than anything else I have ever done. You remove material in order to leave a finished work and so you must see what is hidden beneath waiting to be revealed. Each pass of the blade pushes the snow ahead of you and depending upon the depth and the quality of the snow you must have a plan for where to deposit the material, how to angle the plow as you drive so that it falls away to either side in a controlled manner. Once you’ve left a berm of plowed snow there’s little chance of moving it again absent a melt-off or a visit with a loader to clean it away at a later date. You have to always be thinking about how much snow will bank up over the course of the Winter and just how much space you must leave to be able to get in and out and never let yourself get boxed in. In most cases you visit the property for two or more passes and if the wind gets up and the snow is light and the temperatures cold enough there can be more snow in the plow path than fell originally, drifts that run like dunes across the drives and parking yards. To do the job properly you often have to come to within inches of garages or other structures, there are lamp posts and hedges, walkways and benches and after a good blizzard all of it just disappears beneath a blanket of snow and looks like nothing more than a plow pile or drift. If you know the property you can avoid them, but if you haven’t paid close attention you can do serious damage to both property and plow. Some conditions are more challenging than others; heavy winds can buffet the truck and push you across the road, a wet snow and temperatures below freezing can load up the wiper blades with ice so that every ten minutes or so you’ve got to stop to clean them off by hand just to be able to see through the windshield. Smaller flakes are optimal but sometimes it spirals down in fluffy clots the size of gumdrops and when you’re driving into that kind of snow, even thirty miles an hour, all you can see is a never ending vortex of falling snow, turning in a cyclonic rotation as you move through it, hypnotizing, mesmerizing. The strain on your eyes is one of the hardest parts of the job, always looking ahead into the white glow during the daylight hours, the shallow depth of a hundred feet or less in the pitch black night. When you pass another plow truck there is almost always a friendly wave between drivers, in perfect alignment of purpose and risk. I prefer the bigger snows, the Nor’easters that come in on a weekend that keeps the other drivers home-bound and leaves the roads empty but for us. There have been days when I have driven for an hour without catching sight of another human being, the only sign of life coming from the soft glow of orange light that trembles in each window of the houses along the way. My son and I listen to the radio off and on — he likes sports talk and I prefer oldies or classical and so we compromise, but more often than not we drive in a silence or exchange a few bits of information as we go, concentrating on the task at hand. There is an unwritten law that applies to plow trucks, like ships at sea, that requires you to stop and offer assistance to anyone who is stuck or in need of help along the route. You can count on at least one of these rescue missions every time you plow. Someone in a Subaru stuck half in a snow bank and half out into the road. You turn on the flashers and quickly glove up and try to sum up the problem and solution before you exit the cab. Usually it’s a little bit of shoveling, a couple of handfuls of sand and a quick scoot up under the front or rear end of the car to fasten the tow strap to the shackle or cross member and then cinch it off to the ball mount on the back of the truck and give it a tug. Sometimes it takes only a minute or two, sometimes it can take an hour but you work at it until you get them out and then you go back about your business. In virtually every case the drivers will offer money but you never take it because that’s not why you stopped in the first place, but they always leave with a smile and sincere thank-you and it lifts you up for the rest of the route and pays back in a way that money can’t buy. I always make a little small talk when I’m helping out so that no one feels uncomfortable and one of the questions I always ask is “What brings you out on the road in this kind of weather?” It’s funny that in all this time I have always heard the same answer from every single person I have asked — “I’m going home.” they’ll say. </p>
<p>All of us, I suppose are seeking shelter from the storm.</p>
<p>I like to be useful, it gives me a sense of purpose in this world. I don’t get paid for plowing but my friend always let me use his excavating equipment if I need it on the farm or comes right over whenever I need a hand with something that I can’t handle alone and he has never said no. I know he is paid well for the plow jobs and I am happy to help out with his bottom line in the small way I can and he appreciates my work and that he can depend on me. So the payback, when it comes, is always equally appreciated and just as dependable. You can’t pay for that kind of thing anymore but it has a value nonetheless.</p>
<p>It’s an old trope to be sure, but one that rings true the closer I get to the finish; it’s the journey, not the destination. </p>
<p>Life has always been about survival and sustenance and it hasn’t changed because people depend on others to provide it. But life is much more than that, it’s about the connections you make between like minded folks and the way you build yourself up to deal with whatever comes along, not just physically but mentally and morally. When we first moved up here we thought along the lines of some cataclysm that was coming down the pike and how we’d need enough to feed ourselves and a way to defend against people coming for our stuff. It was, I am ashamed to say, selfish and self-centered. As time went on we found out that the most important things that we’d gained were the relationships we’d built up with our neighbors and in our community. The way you woke up in the morning and went out into the world and how you came back in with your family at the close of each day to reflect on what you did right and could be proud of and what you failed at and needed to improve was all the motivation we needed. That went for not only skills and responsibilities, but how you communicated and dealt with adversity and loss. Year by year we’ve become better people for what we’d given up rather than what we had in the past chosen to accumulate. The trip from consumer to producer may have been our intent at the beginning, but it was our transformation into giving rather than taking that really made us complete. A part of that is age, I assume. You gather things together, then the time comes to cast those things away. </p>
<p>For us there was no single greater reward than the trip we’ve taken together, the way we love and rely upon each other and how we are able to take the bounty it provides and spread it around, which in turn comes back to you a hundredfold.</p>
<p>Yesterday a friend of mine drove over a load of big bales. He cuts hay in the Summer and is always sitting on a stockpile as his reserve currency. He doesn’t raise livestock and he lives alone so we always make sure he’s got an extra set of hands or two at his disposal when he asks — which is rarely — and we pass him some chickens, sausage and beef when we go up to visit. He’d needed to clean out some space because of all the snow and so he was bringing me the bales that were in his way at no charge. It had been warm for a day or two with melting snow and then back to bitter cold and our driveway is steep and long. It had iced over and I hadn’t gotten a chance to sand it, though it was on my short list. He didn’t think about the conditions before he came up the drive and when he was almost at the top he started to slide back with a hay trailer behind him. It could have gone bad, he could have gone the wrong direction and he could have dropped over the steep embankment to the south side of the eskar and suffered a catastrophic loss, but he managed to halt its slide into a snowbank before it jackknifed. He kept his head, and my oldest son and I came out and fired up the tractor. We sorted things out and when we were done we all shared a nice glass of bourbon in the barnyard as a reward and smiled about it. If that kind of thing had happened ten years earlier I don’t think we would have handled it in the same way. Now I was able to just go about things in a manner that provided a solution, with family and friends regardless of the difficulty and the challenge and to find a to way profit that didn’t involve someone else’s loss. We were in balance and in tune with each other and that made everything that much easier to bear.</p>
<p>The weather tells me that we should probably start tapping maples this week, that the big snow is probably done for the year unless we get a freak storm in March. I don’t need a weatherman to tell me what’s coming because I know the cycles of life fairly well by now. I’m not unaware that there are other storms out there that aren’t related to our climate but are caused by humans going through their own seasons of change. Clearly there’s no way of telling how things will play out anymore than I know how many inches will fall in any given blizzard, but I trust that we’re as prepared as we can be, that no matter how severe this man-made tempest may seem, even as it is unfolding, there will be a light at the end of it and all though it there will be people out there doing what they’ve chosen to do to help clear the paths for other people huddled up in their homes and the ones just trying to get back to them. In the meantime we’ll keep doing the things we’ve picked up along the way, looking for the sweet life in the midst of the cold and darkness and do our level best to share it with everyone we can.</p>
<p><img src="https://draxe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/dreamstime_m_2264323.jpg" alt="Tapped Trees" class="responsive" /></p>
<p>IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN. MAPLE SUGARING SEASON. WE WILL START TAPPING THIS WEEK AND START PRODUCTION NOT LONG AFTER. DUE TO THE DEMAND LAST YEAR WE’VE ADDED ANOTHER MAINLINE AND HOPE TO PRODUCE AN ADDITIONAL 10% OVER LAST YEAR. WE PUT EVERY DOLLAR WE EARN FROM SALES TO CONTINUE THIS ENDEAVOR AND IT IS NOT ONE WE WOULD EVER WANT TO GIVE UP SO WE DEPEND ON OUR READERS TO HELP US MAKE THIS YEAR WORTH THE EFFORT. IF YOU’VE EVER TRIED OUR PRODUCT YOU KNOW THAT IT’S A UNIQUE AND HIGH QUALITY NATURAL PRODUCT MADE BY HAND IN LIMITED AMOUNTS. YOU KNOW WE TAKE A GREAT DEAL OF PRIDE IN TURNING OUT SOMETHING SPECIAL AND WE LOVE TO SHARE IT WITH AS MANY CUSTOMERS AS POSSIBLE. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED PLEASE PUT IN YOUR ORDER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. THIS YEAR WE ARE ALSO OFFERING A UNIQUE SELECTION OF CURED BEEF AND PORK; BRESAOLA, PROSCIUTTO, PANCETTA AND CAPICOLA. IF YOU’D LIKE TO SAMPLE ONE OF THESE DELICIOUS AND INDIVIDUALLY CRAFTED PRODUCTS PLEASE LET US KNOW.</p>
<p>FEEL FREE TO EMAIL YOUR REQUEST TO <a href="&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;:&#109;&#101;&#114;&#099;&#101;&#114;&#111;&#097;&#107;&#064;&#104;&#111;&#116;&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;">&#109;&#101;&#114;&#099;&#101;&#114;&#111;&#097;&#107;&#064;&#104;&#111;&#116;&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;</a> OR GIVE ME A CALL @ 603-748-6917</p>
Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:21:21 -0600https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2018/02/11/shelter-from-the-storm/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2018/02/11/shelter-from-the-storm/The Arc of Life<p><img src="https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/img/IMG_0762.jpg" alt="Swings" class="responsive" /></p>
<p>One of the first things I did when we moved up to the farm was to build a swing set for the kids. My oldest son was 11 years old at the time so I had him help me with the project. I bought some rough-sawn eight by eights and dug holes four foot deep into the eskar in front of the house. We cut the seats to length and drilled holes through them for the anchors. He learned to use a belt sander and then an orbital to take down the grain to a soft finish, we painted them bottle green, three coats to stand up to all the use they’d see over time and then we measured the lengths of chain and attached them with clevis yokes to the cross bar at the top. We countersunk holes through the posts where the timbers met using a ratchet to tighten the lag bolts and then filled the cavities with silicon. We spaced the swings evenly, three in total, one for each child. I think that my motivation was so that my wife would soften to the idea of the farm, that she would see that I meant it when I said the most important thing we’d raise here would be our children, that this was not some hard and thankless life of drudgery, but a place of joy, where play would be equal to our work. It was one of those things that seemed like a stroke of genius, but looking back it was almost instinctual. They were for the children — and they were a magnet — not only to our own but to every child who came up that driveway in the years since we put it up, but for the adults as well. It never ceases to amaze me when I see one of the elderly visitors who stop by for eggs or pork chops eye them warily before making their way over and taking a seat. Grown men with sour faces smile when they grab the chains in their gnarled hands and gently push off the grass beneath the swing and then ride back, eyes closed in the afternoon sunlight. The swings are set at different heights so anyone the size of a toddler or taller can climb on and start their ride out above the steep hill a few feet out. If you get them going really fast it feels as if you are launching yourself into space, out above the pasture below, your feet pointing at the clouds with every swing. When the snow is deep we jump off at the apex and plunge some thirty feet out before landing in the deep drifts below, something very few people outside of the family are willing to try, but the exhilaration you feel as your hands let go at the top of the swing, the emptiness inside in the moment before gravity begins to draw you back is hard to describe. The idea is to spread yourself wide before you land so the snowbanks can absorb the weight of your body heading towards the Earth. There is a sound when you hit that’s hard to describe, a soft envelope of freezing air being rent by human form. There is always laughter, from the jumper and the ones on the hill above and it isn’t often repeated twice in a day, but it is something we all look forward to when Winter steals away so many other things we love to do.</p>
<p>Our youngest son has reached the same age as his older brother when we first arrived at the farm and we work on similar projects around the farm using the same kinds of tools and hardware. While we work we talk a great deal about the things that interest him or things that I remember from my own childhood that resonate with him. The other day we got around to a discussion of God and he asked me earnestly how I could be sure that he was there and I tried to explain it to him in a way I hoped he’d understand. We sat on the swings together, not actually riding them, just keeping our feet in place and we pushed slowly back and forth in place and I asked him if he could tell me what he knew about Pi. He’d been having trouble with math at school lately, not because he isn’t capable of understanding it but because they seem incapable of teaching it, so I had tried my best to intercede in showing him some things I thought he’d find fascinating. I drew a circle for him and then asked him to point out the center, which he did and then I asked him how far it was from the center to the edge. He came pretty close — we’d been working on tape measure skills and he understood how to read the inches and the feet and the fractions they were made of — and then I asked him how many times that length would fit around the outside of the circle. He squinted and after a pause where I could sense him trying to calculate the space with his eyes he answered. “Three times?” He said looking up at me. I told him that was a pretty fair guess and then told him it was 3.14159265 and stopped because I had forgotten anything more than that. I made sure to tell him that the actual number had no real end, that it ran on in an endless string of digits that never repeated themselves and that there were, as far as I knew, an incalculable number that the world’s fastest supercomputers had traced out as far as 60 trillion places without an end in sight. The solution to the question was infinite, unknowable, a mystery that mankind would never solve. He nodded, not really knowing where I was going with my explanation, and then I asked him how hard the question seemed when I first asked. “Simple.” I explained how a circle is a shape human beings were certain to encounter in their lives for a myriad of sources — watching ripples expand away from a rock tossed in a pool of water, the shape of a soap bubble blown by a child, the Sun and the Moon. “How long do you imagine it was before the first person tried to solve that simple problem, dividing the radius of a circle into its diameter?” He nodded again. I told him that to me it was a message from God, letting us know that He is there, infinite, beyond our ability to understand yet around us in the most simple things imaginable. God had to know that we would ask that question and that the answer would seem perfectly simple but would in reality be more complex than any attempt we could ever make at understanding it. He recalled an earlier conversation we’d had about the Fibonacci sequence and its carefully hidden, yet easily found patterns that were built into everything from the shape of a human embryo to the galaxy in which we lived and he said that the two seemed alike. I nodded back, smiling, the two of us tracing slight arcs in the air as we sat on the swings. “I think that they are.” I replied, believing it with all my heart.</p>
<p>Not too long ago I came across an old album that my Mother had put together when I was very young. The outside was old and worn and it was once white with embossed title “BABY BOOK” on the front cover. The first couple of pages were filled with deckled black and white Polaroids of myself as an infant. My father was holding me in one, standing on the front yard of my grandparents home and smiling down at his son wrapped up in a blanket against the frigid air of mid-May. There were notes written in my mother’s handwriting; my birth weight, age at first steps, first tooth lost. As you paged through the book the notes stopped and and there were fewer photographs with each passing year until I was somewhere around the age of five or six. In one of the last pictures I am standing in the backyard of our house on Columbia Avenue in Hopewell, flanked on either side by my neighborhood friends Linda Rigo and Donnie Machusak. Behind us was a swing set my father had just put up in the backyard and it brought back a vivid recollection of that day, the bright hot Sun of mid-Summer and the smell of the rich red soil. I had forgotten how much I loved that swing set, how many hours I spent kicking out my feet and bending my legs back, out and back, over and over as the lessons of physics were written on the fibers of my young body; momentum and kinetics, the pendulum and the pull of gravity, nonlinear oscillation. In the photograph there is all of that hidden there right out in the open, the small hand of mine, dirty and angled towards the camera, a worm dangling from my pursed fingertips. And behind it the swing, at rest, and the two of us nothing but a future filled with potential energy. I was, I noticed, the spitting image of my own sons. It took a few minutes to process that thought before I flipped the next page and in the ones that followed there were only a couple of more photographs and then nothing else but empty sheets after that, each one vacant, and left to speculation just like our future.</p>
<p>Just a few days ago, on the morning of the Winter Solstice, I walked out to the swings with the dogs close at my heels in the darkness. It was cold but not bitter and the snow was soft beneath my feet as I took each step. The house was still behind me, the children sleeping in their beds as I took a seat on a swing and waited on the Sun to rise in front of the slant of the hill. The sky was opalescent and as I waited for the glow of morning to rise above the horizon line I thought about how we all come to certain truths in life almost by accident, as if we were meant to discover them because they have been left for us to find. How the small bodies of children, still unsure on their feet, take to rhythm of the swing and delight in its lessons and how no matter our age we all remember what it feels like to rise, higher and higher with each return. This subtle understanding suffuses our being with something more profound than any knowledge we work to obtain because it is written on our souls, by our Creator. As I sat there the trees behind me lit up as if bathed in liquid gold and the rays spilled out from behind the distant hills to the southeast and fell across the snow covered pasture and I pushed off with my feet and began to swing, higher and higher with each kick, smiling all the while.</p>
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Mon, 25 Dec 2017 17:12:10 -0600https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/12/25/the-arc-of-life/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/12/25/the-arc-of-life/Why Are America's Farmers Killing Themselves?<hr />
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers">Why are America’s farmers killing themselves in record numbers?</a></p>
<p><em>The suicide rate for farmers is more than double that of veterans. Former farmer Debbie Weingarten gives an insider’s perspective on farm life – and how to help</em></p>
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<p>The other night I was invited to sit on a panel and talk about modern farming practices in New Hampshire. There was a great crowd, the other presenters were articulate and knowledgeable, the venue was warm and festive and it was a great experience to share the things I’d learned over the past eight years with an audience of attentive and intelligent adults. Our experience has been a very positive one despite the setbacks and losses. Farming is an arduous lifestyle both physically and mentally. Financially it can be a struggle because the income, much like the seasons is never consistent. There is no weekly paycheck, some investments in future returns never come to fruition and losses are often tied to factors that are not ours to control; weather, markets, restrictive regulations, etc. However the rewards and payoffs that come in other areas of our lives have exceeded our wildest expectations. We are healthier, we sleep better, eat better, spend more time together, enjoy more of the meaningful aspects of life and escape the traps of modernity that serve as distractions and time wasters. We improve the world around us, enjoy beauty and sublime moments with regularity, have broadened our community and our contributions to it helping to build a better local environment because of it. We’ve entered into a close relationship with the source of our sustenance that has existed since the beginning of time and which most Americans are completely divorced from in their daily lives. Although we make only a fraction of the income we once had I can say with complete assurance our family is wealthier today than when our bank accounts and investment portfolios were overflowing. The stresses we feel are tied to something real, not contrived and built around illusory expectations that can never be fulfilled. Each day is new despite having a pattern that repeats itself because Nature is ever changing, even as it remains the same.</p>
<p>I read the article above this morning and was struck by two things — how our current culture does everything in its power to divorce people from the land and from meaningful lives tied to reality and then to act shocked when these same people become demoralized and give up. So many farmers have taken the bait of jumping on the Industrial Agriculture merry-go-round in an attempt to join the rest of the modern world and its trappings that they failed to even notice that they too had taken a wrong turn. Farming didn’t kill these people as the article would lead you to believe, it was the radical departure from it while trying to remain on the land that was at the root of their failures.</p>
<p>Most people believe that there is “no going back” to a previous era in life. This has never meant a literal turning back of the clock, of time travel, but that is how they perceive it. But go back we will because our present course is unsustainable. We have become an entire society of specialists so that virtually no one can see the bigger picture. Food comes from the store, the services and care of the medical profession have become a right, income is a guarantee — so much so that those who choose not to participate in life in any meaningful way are fully subsidized and compensated for their very existence. Clearly such a system is doomed to failure. Inputs come from somewhere. The continual use of any resource eventually leads to its depletion. We are going to return to our roots at some point, hopefully we will do it absent a cataclysm, but do it we will.</p>
<p>I have been writing about this for almost a decade, at first to keep some kind of record of what we were up to, but lately to the audience I know can understand what it is I have to say and who sense that they too can retrace their steps from that first false path and hopefully find what it was that was lost along the way.</p>
Thu, 07 Dec 2017 08:37:03 -0600https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/12/07/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/12/07/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves/Politics of the Herd<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mnQkRr0wGfA?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>In the days after I put down Midnight I gave the herd some space, checking on them from a distance as they grazed on the late Summer pasture. I sold her bull calf to a farmer over on ragged mountain where it would get a chance to bring in some new blood and not be left as a reminder of our loss. I have written about the dynamics of cattle herds before so I won’t go into excruciating detail again. Theirs is a matriarchal system and one cow dominates the others, known as the boss. Her immediate circle are almost always her offspring followed by the herd mates from her generation. She leads them to pasture when let out of confinement, she chooses direction during the course of the day and she leads them back to the loafing shed to ruminate at the end of the day. None of it is done with force, but for whatever reason the rest of the herd follow along with her cues and when something special comes up — when I ride out to the field to bring them a treat or when I fill the totes with water, she is always front and center until she gets her fill, the loyal lieutenants on either flank while the rest of the cows wait patiently for their turn. I assumed that her eldest offspring would simply take charge in her absence and the herd would continue on as before with the only change being the absence of the Black Baldy. Over the days that followed I noticed that rather than graze in a straight line as they had done previously, like a living mower across the pastures, the animals had spread apart and were feeding at a distance from each other, occasionally in groups of twos, but clearly not a part of a unified herd as they had been only days before. I also noticed that when I filled the water trough or drove out to bring them corn husks in the Gator that two of the cows had created their own sub herds and were very physical with each other in establishing dominance.</p>
<p>We bought our first four head of cattle not long after we bought the farm. One was a Simmental, two were polled White Faced Herefords and the last was a Black Baldy, a cross between a Hereford and an Angus. They were all bred at the time of the sale and the following spring we had four additional calves effectively doubling the size of our herd. Each year we kept the heifer calves to help build the herd and we slaughtered the previous year’s steers to keep our family fed. In this way we slowly built a small cow/calf operation that produced between five and seven calves each year and allowed us to sell a couple of bull calves as livestock while keeping our freezers filled with vacuum sealed bags of ground beef, roasts and deep purple rib-eyes, NY strips and sirloins for the grill. As time went on we began to breed for the qualities we preferred in our cows; docility, large frame, ease in calving, natural mothering traits and white mane down the back of their sienna hide. This was what is known as a landrace herd, uniquely suited to the climate, pasture and cultural environment of our farm. We only brought in a bull that fit our criteria and only from local farms that bred their own White Face Herefords. Over the years the Simmental traits were bred out leaving a unique freckle pattern on the muzzles of the new calves and larger bags but little else. By the fifth generation the only animal left from the original four, Midnight survived the annual cull and the rest of the animals all bore a very uniform and unique type that was suited to us and our ground. With Midnight out of the picture every animal we had was now a product of our farm having been bred and born here and having spent its entire life in a single place. they were as rooted to this land as we were.</p>
<p>It is commonly accepted in modern science that the domestication of animals took place over a period of ten thousand years, more or less. It likely began with wolves which became the modern day dog species, but it was closely followed by other species, primarily those used for sustenance; cattle, hogs, poultry, goats and sheep. Domestication likely followed the process of taming, closely related, but distinctly different processes and both of these were the result of shadowing, where tribes of humans followed herds of prey in order to harvest them for their meat and skins. It is also commonly assumed that the domestication process which allowed for the genetic refinement of a species based on specific traits was the result of deliberate human action, that it was a one way operation whereby humans controlled the slow and steady alteration of a wild species into one that could be more easily led and controlled, but this ignores a fundamental reality of human behavior. We change too. Domestication is a two way street and as our animal counterparts began to turn into something different than the original form, so too did we. Our days of ceaseless movement, of hunting and gathering at random became less ubiquitous and soon we became rooted to place, forced to spend time where it benefited the livestock as much as the livestock rewarded us. It served to improve the lines of men and women who could adapt to working with animals as counterparts, who understood them less as prey in the moment and more as a stock in the future. It taught us new skill sets like the building of semi permanent dwellings, and confinements as well as new tools and methods for providing for the lives and health of more than our own offspring and family members. In effect the animals we chose to domesticate helped to domesticate us as well. We learned to stay put, to think further in the future than we had ever needed to in the past and to work with one another in a world that demanded far more peaceful interactions than violent ends for success.</p>
<p>The herd began to coalesce around two challengers for dominance, the first offspring of the original Simmental and the first offspring of Midnight. Both were from the same breeding cycle, both had three offspring of their own and both were roughly the same size, twelve hundred pounds each. They had their own cliques and they were both clearly interested in the position for reasons I could not begin to fathom. There was a sharp increase in physicality in every close encounter, head butting that Midnight had always kept to a minimum with just a look was now common behavior at the water trough. The youngest heifers attached themselves to the bull, following him everywhere and trying to build an attachment to the dominant male in the herd, something I had never seen before. Usually the bull is an outsider that tags along with the herd and serves only to protect it from predators and to breed them when their are in season, but otherwise ignored by the cows and the heifers. There were the cows that attempted to stay out of the fray and simply hung back waiting for a resolution to the struggle that was ongoing but they too played a role by simply following whatever the winds of change brought to the herd. Those who failed to participate were still a part of the herd, but their role was near the bottom either way so not much changed regardless of what they did.</p>
<p>The ground we live on is made up of glacial till, a mix of sands and gravel that drains well but which provides for a constant supply of water worn cobbles and fractured granite that come up from the ground wherever there is a disturbance on the surface. We take these rocks and lay them along the fences to help solidify the posts and to provide an extra discouragement for the snouts of the hogs that always work at the bottom of the rails for a chance to escape. Over time they sink back into the loam and disappear from sight. We’ve been working almost a decade at building the soil back with a constant application of carbon; wood chips, manures, shavings, grass clippings, leaves. And to this we put the hogs to work to till it all in, to deepen the soil structure and amend it to the kind of depth that will lock the rocks into the deeper substrate. One animal after another is put to use, not just in feeding us, but in feeding the living soil with their work and altogether every living thing on this piece of ground works together in a symbiotic relationship, constantly manipulating the other into becoming something slightly different, more efficient, interdependent. For the animals it means a higher quality manure and more protein per living pound, for the humans an animal with an ethic of responsibility and industry that has the ability to plan for the future and to keep predators at bay even while it harvests the surplus from the herds and flocks which produce them. </p>
<p>A few nights back my youngest son and I watched a program called “What On Earth?” that featured a series of anomalies discovered by satellite imagery and the possible explanations for their causes. A few are natural and some are inexplicable but most are the kinds of things that anyone could easily figure out if they put their mind to it. One of the featured sites was a series of extremely long stone lines in a desert area in western Asia. The host and his experts postulated a series of possible explanations, even pointing out an ancient knapped stone hand ax that was found along the wall indicating, they supposed, a defensive boundary. They came to the conclusion that the stones were part of an old fortified wall, but why it was made up of so many small rocks rather than readily available larger boulders and how it happened to be located in such a remote and arid area would forever remain a puzzle. I understood it at once as something different — it was the remnants of an ancient fence line, the stones merely the debitage of where the people who had inhabited that area long ago had deposited the stones that came to the surface during their agrarian activities. The climate may have changed, they may have ruined the soils through overuse and it is almost certain that what the area was today, five thousand years ago it may have been verdant and productive. The long row of rocks was never meant as a wall, but rather it was a convenient location to dump rock waste in a place that was at one time fertile and served as either pasturage or a confinement area for early herds. Just like the kind of remains that will one day be found on our farm.</p>
<p>I think that humans consider themselves as distinct and different from all the other living organisms that inhabit this planet, that we are unique among all the species in that the laws of Nature do not apply to us if we find them inconvenient or troublesome. We have the ability to think so far outside the box that we come up with ideologies and beliefs that are rooted in nothing but fantasy and dreams, disconnected from the physical world which we inhabit. We fight wars, spend untold wealth and sacrifice our very survival on ideas so nebulous and unrealistic that it makes the mind reel. On any given day there is almost always some news item or program that postulates about the day we make contact with extraterrestrial life while we completely ignore the myriad of living forms that live among us, the majority of which are invisible to the human eye. Some of these are so fantastic, so alien in their own right and appearance as to shame the creators of Hollywood’s greatest monsters, but they are here and they are common and so we fail to consider communication or study in any way that approximates our fascination with whatever may be out there that we can never know. We also forget that even though we live individual lives we are still part of a larger organism that is our family, our tribe, our race and our species and that these all have their own unique destinies which require our participation even though we seem oblivious to the movements and evolution of this greater living organism. Like the cows jockeying for some kind of supremacy within the herd we too fall into one of any number of camps with our human counterparts, seeking to either fit in with one, or identify ourselves by our resistance and conflict with another. Cattle and hogs and chickens and goats have been carefully selected for any number of attributes over spans of time longer than any living human can imagine and they have become something very different, but so to have we. We use them to feed us we think, but forget that they have taught us to feed them. Domestication suits livestock, but it suits us as well and we should take closer note of the evidence of this process, like the experts who tried to decipher the meaning in the stone lines left across the desert floor and see if maybe we aren’t being manipulated by invisible borders of our own design.</p>
<p>The herd has worked itself out in the last weeks of grazing. The daughter of Midnight prevailed and the bossy behavior has subsided from the daughter of the Simmental. The heifers are back to the cows again and the bull is on his own, living at the edge of the herd to keep an eye out for predators and to await another estrus where his services will be required. Perhaps they sense the shortening of the days and that soon they will be corralled into the Winter sacrifices and that in close quarters it is likely better for all of them to find a form of compromise that allows them to get on with the business of being.</p>
Sun, 01 Oct 2017 10:30:32 -0500https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/10/01/politics-of-the-herd/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/10/01/politics-of-the-herd/Summer Song<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/CBAHJ6WjAZY?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>When I came downstairs just before dawn my son was in the kitchen making final preparations for his departure. I helped him carry out the last of his things, tucking a few bottles of syrup behind the driver’s seat next to the bags of potatoes, onions and the cooler filled with meat. The two of us stood together in the cool air and watched as the golden glow of sunlight appeared in the east transforming the barnyard into something magical. Down in the front pasture we could hear one of the calves calling and the herd lowing in response. There was a column of blue vapor rising from the surface of the trout pond and so we agreed without speaking to walk together one last time, down the hill, quietly, side by side long shadows cast behind us.</p>
<p>When we first moved up here I bought four bred cows from a farmer in Springfield and he delivered them to us in a stock trailer. I didn’t know a thing about cattle back then, had never heard of Simmental or Hereford except in some story I may have read but we were excited to finally be farmers and looked forward to raising our own livestock and one day eating thick steaks right off the grill that came from animals we’d raised ourselves. Every herd has a dominant animal, a boss and in matriarchal systems like cow herds, she sets the tone for the behavior of all the others. A flighty boss is a problem and a calm one is a blessing and the only black cow in the herd, a cross between a Black Angus and a White Faced Hereford called a Piebald was our new leader. The kids named her Midnight and I took to her right away. She loved to have her head rubbed and to be talked to in calm tones and every year she threw a healthy calf for us, each one a full White Face Hereford without a hint of her Black Angus coat showing. She was calm with us, but rode herd on the other cows, especially when we’d feed out bales in the Winter and this May she gave us a nice little bull calf that thrived from the get-go. Whenever I had to move the herd, she was the first in line and the easiest cow we have ever owned in every way. You can 20 years out of a good cow but we never knew her real age so we had to guess at it based on her teeth and her general health and we figured her for something close to ten or so when she arrived. Last December she got the scours and though we tested for bacteria and parasites it came up inconclusive and eventually she regained her strength and put the weight back on to where she was able to calve without a hitch in the Spring. A few weeks back I noticed that she wasn’t herself and had resumed her weight loss from the same kind of thing she’d had last Winter. I consulted with our vet by phone and he was his usual taciturn self when he told me that other than to keep her apart from the others — none of them had shown any sign of whatever it was that she was going through — and feed her a dry feed for a couple of days in the hopes that it was something she’d gotten into, like bracken ferns or poke weed and it would work itself out. “They get old, you know.” he told me and I thanked him for his advice. So we isolated her and her calf and kept an eye on them as the Summer wound down and she slowly but surely failed.</p>
<p>Way back when we lived in New Jersey we’d kept a garden, a small one in the same spot where my Grandfather had raised his tomatoes and peppers. We never did a lot, but we tried new things and every once in a while we’d stumble across something that excelled. One year I planted some sweet potato vines along the rock wall that bordered the driveway facing south and when the first frost killed off the leaves I pulled up the tubers from the rich composted loam I’d back filled the wall with and surprised everyone with beautiful and delicious sweet potatoes the size of turkeys. My father has a photograph stuck to the front of his refrigerator of himself cradling one in his arms like a baby, a big grin on his face. Looking back I wonder if it was that kind of thing that gave me the idea of going back to an agrarian lifestyle, the ability to make things grow that could feed my family and bring smiles to the people I loved. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that it was the particular mix of the soil, the placement of the vines in a terraced wall that absorbed the heat of the Sun, the lack of pests that had never had that particular species to predate upon before, and any number of other factors that had nothing to do with me or my limited skill sets at that time that brought about that little miracle. In all the years since I’ve never produced anything like that crop, at least intentionally.</p>
<p>When we first moved to the farm it had been fallow for the past sixty years, the soils depleted, the ground stony and completely lacking fertility. We set about putting in a garden and the first year as ambitious as we were and as much time as we put in we were met with very little in the way of reward. Colorado potato bugs went through my crop of Kennebecs, russets and Kerr pinks like an army. I tried picking them off and when I fed a coffee can full of the insects to the tank full of tilapia we were raising I killed off half of them, poisoned by the solanine that had accumulated in the bugs from eating the leaves of the nightshade. For four more years I tried potatoes in different parts of the garden, in raised beds and in standing compost piles with little luck as each years the potato bugs came back to destroy the crop before it set. I finally gave up and took to bartering with a friend down the road who had figured it out and until this year we planted other crops. The interns asked me about planting potatoes and I told them the story of how I’d seen a guy a long time ago raise them in stacks of old tires filling them with soil until the leaves emerged and then stacking on another and filling it, repeating the move until the column was six or seven tires tall. he called them radial potatoes and at the end of the season he’d knock it over and reap a bumper crop, no digging necessary. They asked if they could do it and I agreed to let them give it a shot, but we were at least a month behind the typical planting start and by the time they headed back to college the stack was only one tire tall and they considered the experiment a failure. A couple of weeks after they departed for Ohio I noticed that the leaves were as healthy as any I’d ever seen and I carefully added a second tire to each plot and back filled the inner area with composted manure only to have the new sprouts poke through within a matter of days. And still, not one sign of beetles. In our failure to plant in a timely fashion as dictated by the gardening guides we’d skipped past the life cycles of the pests that had plagued us for years and finally gotten our first good crop, thanks to the interns. </p>
<p>On the side table behind the desk where I write is a small framed photograph of my oldest son when he was four years old walking beside me. My wife took the photograph from behind and in that snapshot she captured the two of us strolling together in sync, our arms and legs in matching cadence as we marched across the parking lot towards the entrance of Story Book Land. His head is inclined in my direction and you can tell we are talking about something although I can’t remember what, but I am listening to him, head tilted towards his, long shadows trailing behind us. It’s been there so long that I almost never notice it, but when I do it stops me flat every single time and I am carried back to that moment as if it just happened, the way it felt to be a father of someone so young with everything still ahead of him. I will be forever grateful to my wife for catching that moment in time so that I will never forget it. I’m not sure why I placed it where I did, maybe another of those instinctual tics that we all have, putting the past behind us as we move forward.</p>
<p>They say that the human eye can see more shades of green than any other color in the spectrum. There are varying theories on why this is — to help pick out patterns where predators lurk, because our diet is made up of so much plant matter, and because green is in the center of the visual spectrum and diurnal animals are exposed to more sunlight allowing for this. Whatever the reason the truth remains, as in all things, if we pay close attention. There was an animated discussion recently regarding the tendency of people to see patterns where none exist and while the majority of people might believe this, the longer I have lived and the more I have experienced the more certain I become that the primary reason for our obsession with these various patterns is that they do exist; numeric, artistic, spiritual, cultural. Waves crash onto the shore in threes, the Fibonacci sequence is built into everything from the embryo to the shape of the galaxies, seasons repeat endlessly, generations are born, grow and fade away, one after another, each one a variation of the one before it. When my son and I got to the bottom of the big pasture we sat for a while on the rock wall and looked back up at the farm, the buildings barn red and trimmed in white, the cattle grazing contentedly in the tall grass, the dogs chasing each other without a sound along the treeline. I pointed out to him a singular sugar maple that we’d both seen a thousand times and asked him what he thought of it, its perfect symmetry forming a wineglass shape against the sky, emerging from a massive granite boulder. “It looks healthy but you can tell it’s about to turn.” he said, indicating the reddish cast of the leaves. I told him to look at it again and see if he could make out what I’d only noticed a few months ago myself. We both looked for a while and it finally became apparent that it wasn’t a lone maple, but a perfectly matched pair, one on either side of the boulder and that the two of them had grown in such complete harmony and unity that they had become two perfect halves of a whole mimicking the shape of a textbook specimen. There was only the slightest differentiation between the color of the leaves and where the boulder emerged you could clearly make out the dual trunks, one on either side in the dark shadows beneath the canopy. They were clearly the same approximate age and had rooted in the perfect spot, just above a natural spring on the hillside, firmly anchored on the rocky ledge and grown together over a century or more until they had imperceptibly become one. We finally stood back up and retraced our path up the hill and before he climbed into his car we stood there and hugged each other good-bye, his body larger and stronger than my own, but feeling to me like that little boy in the photograph behind my desk. We did the hand shake/drive safe/call when you get in doxology we always do and both of us smiled broadly at each other as he drove down the lane, his hand extended in a wave the entire way, my gnarled fingers splayed wide, waving back.</p>
<p>After my wife and the children had gone off to do the things they had to do that morning I retrieved my rifle and pocketed a few rounds from the ammo box and headed out to the pole barn. The Piebald was laying down, her head laid out in front of her in a way cows never do and I sat down next to her for a little while and stroked her head and told her what a good girl she was. The last of the flies were landing on her flank and she sighed a few times and opened her eyes to look at me, then closed them again while I sat there and sighed a little myself. After a bit I dug deep and did what I had been hoping that I wouldn’t have to do for so many days now. I was glad that my son had gotten off before it came to this, and maybe that’s the reason I’d waited and I hoped that it hadn’t caused her any more discomfort than it had and when I was certain that she was gone I went back to the barn to the rifle up on its pegs and to start up the tractor to move her, one last time.</p>
<p>There are patterns, cycles, comings and goings that continue whether we want to see them or not and some of them are profound and others not so much, but they are always there beneath everything we see and everything we do, holding the world up for us without thanks, without need because that is its purpose and has always been. Sometimes, if we are lucky, if we look back or look up we occasionally catch a glimpse of it, that perfect world in all its ineffable and heartbreaking splendor.</p>
Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:18:16 -0500https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/09/06/summer-song/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/09/06/summer-song/Take Shelter<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/7SX-HFcSIoU?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>The apple trees are loaded this year, the red blush spreading across the sides of the fruit that face the Sun so that the trees themselves seem to glow like a bed of coals with each soft breeze breathing life into the orchard itself. It was something I’d never noticed before, thinking that the hue of each apple was simply the result of its genetic predisposition rather than an actual change brought about by effects of the environment. It’s like that these days, the things noticed that become a steady accumulation of knowledge that feeds us in advance of our hunger. Last year there were so few apples that we never got to press any for cider, made no vinegar and now are forced to buy it in to make pickles with the overflow of cucumbers that reproduce faster than a family can eat them, even though we give it our best shot every day. The maples too are so weighed down with samaras that the ends of the branches are bent as much as they have ever been and tinged gold where the wings of each pod have bleached out, delicate veins tracing the periphery of each whirly-gig, seeds swollen, expectant. Last year was the hundred year drought and despite all the rain in early Summer we are right back at levels lower than we ought to have at this time of the year and so the color has begun to appear in the low spots, weeks ahead of schedule. If I was to guess I’d say we were due for a severe and long Winter, but that’s only based on the experience of less than ten years on this piece of land. Maybe the harbingers I see indicate something else, but you never know so I’ve doubled my efforts lately to tighten up the ship ahead of the proverbial storm. There are other indicators as well — there more heifers than bull calves this year, same as it was before the last bad Winter and the spring pigs are 30% larger than they were this time last year even though they come from the same sows, born at the same time. The heads on the grasses were so loaded when we cut the last of the hay on the fallow fields that we just left it to turn back into the pasture and seed itself.</p>
<p>For the past couple of weeks since the interns departed my oldest son and I have been steady at it, finishing up the tasks we had begun with enthusiasm, now with the realization that not all of them would be completed before the first snows arrive. One of the jobs was to rebuild the road from the sand pit to the pole barn, a thousand foot winding path along the edge of the old sugar bush that had been badly eroded over the course of the past five years or so. I had cleared the face of the eskar back along its breadth, from the big field on the southern edge of the property to the low ground that ran at the top edge of the old apple orchard and back dragged it repeatedly to provide a long, easy approach that allowed me to run the loader into the sands without disturbing the new grass that ran up to the bank run like an emerald carpet. Each load weighs approximately a half ton and covers thirty or forty square feet six inches deep. I started at the bottom near the stream crossing and worked my way up running over the established borders again and again until it was compacted into a solid, level surface that opened the back forty to any kind of traffic. I probably cut out two hundred cubic yards of bank run sand, the finest band that ran through the middle of the drumlins around here. I’d been pecking away at it since we bought the place, utilizing the enormous stockpile of fine grained sands and quartzite cobbles that had been deposited in the Laurentide glaciation that occurred seventy-five thousand years ago and receded in waves between twenty-one and fourteen thousand years ago. The glaciers moved southward as far as the Cape pushing the accumulated soils of a hundred thousand years before it, like a mile thick wall of ice propelled by the forces of Earth’s ever changing climate. Underneath it all huge chasms and channels were carved on its underside as it slid over the bare bedrock beneath; granite, feldspar and schist, igneous rock formed during the Devonian period some 400 millions years ago. Inside these halls of ice were a slurry of frozen boulders, sands and gravels that ground against each other for hundreds of centuries, year by year leaving evidence of the altering landscape in a wavy strata of variegated bands that resembled freshly cut malachite. Near the bottom of the deposit where the bedrock was exposed in parallel runs of ledge the bigger boulders had been trapped against the solid floor of the valley and around them larger rocks, all of them smooth and ovate, some as big as basketballs, others as small as quail eggs forming an anchor for the smaller aggregates that built upon this foundation. One afternoon a section that reached the very top fell away into the cut as a whole, burying the banked floor of the quarry in a pyramid of sand and leaving behind it an exposed wall of time opened for the first time to human eyes. You could see where the spaces were between each eon were clearly defined by a small band of organic material, a dark stripe only inches thick that represented a thousand years of warm weather and perhaps three consecutive forestations that rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell again and again before the ice walls returned and buried life for as long as the earth spun in the cold depths of the Ice Age. Halfway up the wall I noticed a curious design that made me turn off the tractor and climb up to inspect up close. There, perhaps twenty feet deep from the top of the exhausted cap of the eskar was a line that ran at a 40 degree angle from west to east across the sand hill. It was clear that whatever had happened had happened suddenly, unlike the accumulated bands of snad beneath, this one cut them off at an oblique angle as if something massive had come upon it from the north, a single stroke that cut through the sands as effectively as the loader and carried off the evidence of the glaciers work above that spot. The new sands were built up differently, too; finer, whiter without the random pebbles that made up the material beneath. I have heard about the Champlain Sea, the build up of melt waters held back by the glaciers that backed up the valleys along the Connecticut River and above, how they had broken through as the ice retreated and poured forth in a flood some thirteen thousand years ago. Maybe this was the evidence of it, the wall of water that carried three times as much volume as present day Lake Ontario in a matter of hours, a biblical event preserved in the soil of our farm until now. I climbed back on the tractor and went back to my meager efforts, building something that might not last a decade.</p>
<p>You look back over your life and certain moments stand out, certain years. Big things happen when you are seven, or eighteen, then again at twenty-five and thirty-three and in your memory they etch a kind of mark across your life, a trace of who you were before you became who you are today. You don’t often get to look at life with the clarity you apply to the rest of the world, rarely do you find it as easy to solve your own trivial problems the way you imagine you’d fix the bigger ones because you are too close to them to appraise the issues. In this way we help to create the problems of the larger kind because all the real changes that have meaning begin with each of us. I tried this past Summer to step back a little bit from the things out there that have troubled me for so many years now to try and find a way to just repair what I could. I taught some young men the things I knew how to do in the best way I could manage and their development during that time taught me a great deal as well. They mastered some basic skills and built some things they could be proud of, they worked well together, ate good food and slept the sleep of the just. They learned how to do quite a few things that they’ll probably use over and over for the rest of their lives and built up enough confidence in their abilities to tackle just about anything that comes along. A few days after they left I went to the workbench in the garage barn and discovered four birdhouses, each one different and signed on the bottom with the date and this morning I went out and mounted them to the last of the fence posts that they’d installed at the beginning of the Summer. I missed having them around not for what they’d done for us, but for being able to watch what they’d done for themselves. I got an email from one of them the other day, a kind of post script to the weekly essays I’d had them write each Friday to help them remember what they had done, what they’d accomplished.</p>
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<p>“Sorry for sending this to you so late. I wanted to reminisce on the whole experience. It was hard to put the whole summer into words but there is only one way to really explain it and it was a once in a life time Summer. I want to say thanks again to you and your family for all that you had done for Pat, Willex, and I. We all will remember this Summer for as long as we live, at least I know I will. I can’t say thank-you enough for letting us come out and have you teach us as much about farming and life lessons that you did. “ -Anthony</p>
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<p>The other night I couldn’t sleep and so I decided to watch a movie I’d been meaning to get to for a while now. The actor portrayed a working man living in Ohio who experienced a sense of dread about an uncertain future and did his best to prepare for it. He dreamed about a storm that was just over the horizon and he began to make preparations in his real life to save his family from an event that haunted his thoughts. I understood his motivation and though it was dark and brooding and it reflected the way that things seemed to be heading in the bigger world outside — the conflicts that seem to be brewing between people, about the course of our nation. He spent as much time questioning his own internal motivations as he did preparing a storm shelter in his backyard and while the community slowly turned on him for his actions, his unease grew sublimated by his determination to do what he must for the safety of his family. I wondered, as I watched it, if the writer and director understood the metaphor they’d crafted and when the climax reached its peak it became clear that there are no answers to the questions that we have, that the future comes for us all and we do the best we can in the meantime. We do what we can to find the meaning in life that we all desire, we can prepare as best we can but the rest is just beyond our reach, out there somewhere in the uncertain days ahead. </p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/I5U4TtYpKIc?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>I’m pretty sure that the Winter ahead will be a long one and so I make what preparations I can but I could just as easily be wrong. Our story isn’t over yet, each layer being laid out one upon another, building on itself over time until we find a way to see where we’ve come from, and where we’re heading. The dogs are barking at unseen things in the dark as they do every night and the days are shorter now, one by one as we move out again in another orbit, colder, further, darker than the last. But today was a good one and that is enough for now.</p>
Fri, 18 Aug 2017 05:43:32 -0500https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/08/18/take-shelter/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/08/18/take-shelter/Old Home Day<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xTeI65yrhGw?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>In New England there is an annual tradition that goes back to the aftermath of the Civil War called Old Home Day. The original idea was to welcome back the veterans and their families who had moved off of the rocky soil to seek a better future out in the vast prairie lands of the Midwest driven in part by westward expansion that followed the conflict but also to escape the memory of seeing the elephant, leaving the dead to bury the dead. When the young leave the old behind there isn’t much of a future left to be hopeful about, so some clever resident in his dotage came up with a plan to try and lure them back, if only for a while, to reconnect the generations on common ground. It’s held in the early part of the Summer, usually right around the time of the first hay cut of the year where the extra hands would come in handy. Call it a twofer. Every town and village throws a big party complete with picnics, parades, games for the children and the presentation of a ceremonial cane to the oldest living resident in the area. Families reassemble from wherever they’ve moved off to for the day and even though it is open to anyone passing through there is a definite feeling of place that runs through it all. In our town military re-enactors come out dressed in full battle garb and run drills, set up camps and offer anyone interested a glimpse into the life of soldiers from different eras from the Revolutionary to the Second World War. The Meeting House is opened up, Lincoln impersonators give speeches, bouncy houses are pumped full of air for the kids, chicken and pork are grilled in big pits on the green and American flags still fly in the gentle breezes, rain or shine. It is almost impossible not to become enamored with a people and a place that holds so closely to its kinship and connections and to share whatever it has with whomever arrives.</p>
<p>We’re moving into high Summer now, the list of projects and needs seeming to be just as long as it was at the beginning with just a little less light each day as the planet tips back on its axis. We’ve put on a roof, built shelters, dug trenches and installed water lines and hydrants on the big pasture. Fences have been installed, the calves all delivered, piglets sold off, hay wagons rebuilt and grass mowed. The corn is up, the first of the cucumbers are just about ready and everywhere you look there is a deeper shade of green than there was the day before. We’re stocking up the sugarhouse with firewood, building walls of it along the paddocks to dry for next season and there are ricks of cord wood piled high in various places around the upper plateau waiting to be split and stacked. Last week a couple from Indiana, long time readers of the blog, came by to visit for a few days. They came on their vacation to see a part of the country they had never seen before and we welcomed them on the farm to share their skills with the interns while we shared some of the products of our labors in return. The husband was one of the most experienced welders I have ever met and he helped us with a half a dozen projects that were so far out of my wheelhouse that they had remained on the shelf just waiting for the right hand to complete. He took the time to teach them how to grind and cut iron, prepare the surfaces and weld a solid bead. They fixed the twisted tongue of the John Deere hay wagon, repaired the ruined lift carriage on the big log splitter and came up with a way to make the auger arch solid again. I worked with his wife in the sugarhouse rendering tallow and filling mason jar after mason jar with the finished product, pale yellow like the Moon at nightfall. We ate some delicious meals as well, roasted chickens and sausages, grilled asparagus and hamburgers and all of us sat down at the new picnic table we’d built to eat the products of our labor under the cool shade of the big maples. The conversations and stories that we told each other brought smiles and laughter and the excitement of seeing the farm through someone else’s eyes gave us all a big shot of enthusiasm at the exact moment when some of energy was flagging. The weather for those couple of days was dreary and cool with a tight mist that closed the place up in space. There was the farm and there wasn’t anything else beyond it. You couldn’t see past the hedges or the back fence so we concentrated on our work soaked in the moist air. We picked berries, shared a few beers together after the day came to a close and learned about how God had worked in all of our lives, leading us to that very moment. On the last day of the visit the Sun broke through and the air dried out and the views of Kearsage rising up from the valley floor in the distance showed just how big and broad this place was and how small and insignificant the homestead looked against it all. They traded some of their home made pickles and apple butter for some of our syrup and when we shook hands and gave each other hugs it was as if we’d been friends all our lives. They drove down the lane and we watched them go with the promise that if we ever needed some help with a project and if either of us was ever in the neighborhood again, it would be like Old Home Day.</p>
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<p>This week, I did something that I thought I’d never do and it was learning how to weld. On Friday, this week Marc had a friend come to the farm from Indiana to weld some of the farm equipment back together. Pat and I spent the entire day Friday learning how to prep for welding, safety use of a welder, and welding two pieces of metal together. Pat and I quickly learned that it wasn’t as easy as Mike made it look. We noticed that it took a steady hand, and steady eyes to weld. Mike taught us how to flux weld, which is a different kind of welding that uses a wire with a powder that stops oxygen from entering the weld. Pat and I got to use the Hobart welding machine and practiced trying the many techniques and tips that Mike showed us. Altogether I thought the experience was great and it was also very intriguing to learn something useful like welding.-</p>
<p>-Wilex</p>
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<blockquote>
<p>This is the great thing about this internship that I really like. Instead of just teaching us about the basics of green farming in New England he’s is teaching use different skill sets that will prove beneficial in upcoming careers. I realize that it’s important to learn the education side of environmental sciences but I believe that in future jobs me knowing trades will get me far in my career. So far, I’ve learned Carpentry, welding, roofing, agricultural planting, plant identification and farming. All of these things are new to me with little to know experience in the past and I’m very thankful for the opportunity to expand my knowledge and skills. These last few weeks in New Hampshire are going to go by quickly and although I miss Ohio I’m sad to soon leave this amazing wilderness.</p>
<p>-Patrick</p>
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<p>One evening last week after our work was done I went back out to the garden to weed for a bit as the last rays of golden light streamed through the branches of the big maples. While I pulled up the emerging sprouts along the lower end of the potato patch, a single black capped chickadee flew in and began to walk along the row, carefully inspecting each plant before hopping on to the next. Every few feet or so he would pause when he came into a shaft of warm light on the surface of the soil and let out a note that sounded like “Seat!” high pitched, melodious. And then he would move on to the next plant, repeating his examination. I paused to watch him as he made his way down the entire row and then return back through the cucumbers, carefully scrutinizing each plant as if he were one of the ladies from the garden club. When he found a spot of sunlight, he paused and sang as if on stage and only then move on. He continued the linear route, back and forth up each row through nasturtiums, beets, onions, carrots, acorn squash, asparagus beds and Indian corn. Every so often he would lean in an pick off some unseen insect or seed from the soft compost spread along the edges of the rows before resuming the tour through the garden and I sat, mesmerized by his thoroughness and intensity. This went on for at least five minutes and when he had satisfied his curiosity, he flew directly over to where I was crouched and took up a position on the tip of a picket beside me and swiveled his head in my direction, black eyes gleaming. He cocked his black capped head one last time and let out a final “Seat!” then flew off over the paddock and through the orchard into the woodlot beyond. I felt as if he was acknowledging my efforts in some way, maybe thanking me for the work I’d put in so that he could come down and enjoy his last few moments of sunlight in the orderly rows of lush vegetables, having his evening snack before heading off to whatever nest or perch he’d occupy for the night. I remained where I was a bit longer than I would have and when I stood up and stretched my legs at last I looked back at the garden with a new set of eyes and smiled.</p>
<p>I miss the way that things were when I was younger. It seemed to me to be a better world; saner, healthier in many ways than the bloated and tattooed reality I bump into whenever I venture out into the public sphere but it is gone and it is never coming back. Nostalgia is an old man’s game, the young have no understanding of it and all they can perceive is the possibility of the future before them. I have come a long way back to finding purpose in my life from living in the midst of modern culture to finding this perch on the furthest edge but it suits me. Knowing that at least a few of the things I have picked up along the way will be useful to someone just starting out gives me a much better feeling about the world than to pine for what is gone. This week we’ll button up a few more little things around the farm and talk about one last project before the interns make ready for their return to college. I hope that they’ve gotten half as much out of this experience as we have. We appreciate the work that they’ve accomplished here but more than that they’ve helped us to become comfortable with the thought of moving into the next part of our lives, where our contributions aren’t measured so much by the calories we burn and the labor we expend, but by the knowledge we pass on. I have come to believe that virtually everything we do in this life that arises from our conscious decisions repays us in similar fashion. You reap what you sow and if the choice is to do good things, good things come back. We will miss our son and his friends very much and we hope that they will have the kinds of memories that will draw them back to visit, maybe on Old Home Day, and they can pitch in for a bit as we move closer to that ceremonial cane and the certain future that lies ahead of us all.</p>
Wed, 19 Jul 2017 05:32:42 -0500https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/07/19/old-home-day/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/07/19/old-home-day/How We Learn What We Know<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/tR-qQcNT_fY?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>All of the big summer storms come in from the west. They build up their energy somewhere out in the middle of the country and as they move the moisture is drawn up from Lake Champlain before it has a go at us. You can feel it coming for hours, the barometer drops, the birds fly lower across the barnyard and the crows take up positions on the west side of the piggery, sitting hunched up on the split rail fence squawking to each other as if they were making plans. The dogs come in from the lawn about thirty minutes in advance of the first drops of rain, perhaps they can hear the distant thunder as it echoes through the Connecticut River Valley up around Walpole just over the last ridge of hills. They hunker down in a hidey hole under the barn and stay there until the storm has passed, every time. The first peels of thunder reverberate along the Mink Hills, a low rumble that goes on and on, echoing against the granite ledges and steep hillsides along the lake. It’s always a good sign to pick up the tools and make ready for the approaching front. We always sit out the heaviest part of the storm, watching the lightning strikes as they pass overhead, counting the seconds between the flash and the report to judge just how close it will come. We’ve had several strikes on the house and the trees since we’ve lived here, lost our computer to one, had a strike come so close that every hair on my body stood on end and all I could see for half an hour was a jagged blue image whether my eyes were open or shut. After the storms pass to the east the Sun emerges just above the edge of the mountain over the maple orchard and the rays chase the back edge of the front, still raining as it goes. When the light hits it we are treated to massive rainbows, often double, sometimes triples that seem to be fixed above the farm itself, each end rooted in the pastures and the forest of this place we love. Last week my father was visiting us and after the storm passed I told him to come out and see the rainbow a minute or two before it appeared. The kids came running because they knew it would show up and we all stood out on the terrace as the last few drops of rain fell and the peels of thunder receded with the clouds. As if on cue it appeared, a stunner of a rainbow, two annealed together in a wide arc with a third below it, glowing in the colors of the spectrum. We stood together just watching this phenomenon, the red-gold light of the western sky giving off a radiant warmth on our backs.</p>
<p>The interns have turned into a solid unit over the course of the past few weeks. We’ve added some basic mechanical skills to the workload and turned to projects off farm as well. We’ve put a new roof on for the Colonel, run a cookout for a neighboring business, and picked up more off site carbon than you could shake a stick at to turn back into soil. They’ve learned their way around cattle management, watched as the last of the calves have dropped and then taken their place beside their mothers, more heifers than bullocks this year and for some reason I let them name them as they arrived — Mystery, Tex, Star and Liberty. I’ve made a point to hold meetings twice a week, Monday morning and Friday afternoon and we sit together at the new picnic table they built and discuss the plans for the week to come or go over the successes and failures of the week that has passed. Mondays always seem to be filled with promise, Fridays with a good dose of reality. I lay out the expectations, name each project and remind them of the things they’ll need to do. They bring me up to speed on what they require from me, how they feel about the progress from the week just passed and generally reaffirm what it is we’re doing. Each of us states the high water mark of the week and the low point and though they are often different there is an emerging theme. The lowest point used to be a projection — I didn’t give the right instructions, I didn’t provide the details or the proper tools but now it seems to rest on them, they didn’t ask the question or look for what they needed, they forgot to return something to its place or they didn’t pay close enough attention to what I’d said. The highlights are always the same — a personal accomplishment for which they were solely responsible; planting the last of the cutting garden, completing the picket fence, organizing the barn. I have tried to emulate the way that I was taught when I was in basic infantry school a long time ago, I give them an explanation, a demonstration and practical application of whatever the work detail will be and then allow them to succeed or fail. They come to me on occasion, but more often than not they have come to rely on each other to solve the problems they encounter and that has made them into a cohesive unit that handles their own problems and basks in their own successes. We picked up our beef from the slaughterhouse last week and the first thing we did was dig into the rib steaks and grill up more meat than you would have thought five men could eat. It seems lie such a little thing, an evening barbecue after a long day, but it made such an impact that they talked about it for the rest of the week. I told them that they now understood what it was like to have a stake in the game and they laughed at the line even if it wasn’t that funny. Chores are a daily feature of each day but on Sunday the rest of the day is their own. I ask for a written submission at the end of each week and they have all been pretty good about it, submitting a mix of photos and short video clips along with a brief description of the work they’ve been doing and I have made a point to comment to them individually on their writing. As each week has passed the work has improved, not so much because of the practice, but because they clearly understand that what they are doing has meaning, if not in their lives, to ours. The children adore them and love to regale them with stories or memories whenever they get a chance and my wife has made a point to do little things for them like keep the big box freezers filled with popsicles. They spend most of their free time on the farm either fishing or swimming or binge watching Game of Thrones on a sheet they’ve hung in the barn using our old projector that they have ingeniously wired into their devices. One day after they helped a friend of mine remove several tons of salvaged dock from a client’s property he brought them a couple of cases of beer as a thank-you and you would have thought it was Christmas by the way they reacted.</p>
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<p>This week started off great at the farm, with the completion of our smoke house we were able to eat fresh homemade apple wood smoked bacon all week. The garden picket fence that has taken us nearly three weeks to complete is almost finished and getting compliments from every visitor we have at the farm. It finally feels like our group has finally figured out how to succeed in working together to complete tasks and it feels great. Overall this work week was our most successful week yet, excluding a few minor errors we had we completed more tasks than ever. The main thing I’ve learned this week did not come from actually working with my hands completing our tasks but through wisdom of others. Later in the week I found out some unsettling news that I feared would come but caught me off guard. This information that I had found out had me confused and hurt, but the only thing I wanted to do was get to the woods to clear my head. I decided to explore the wilderness of New Hampshire and to embark on a hike that would prove beneficial for my physical health and most importantly my mental health. When I found Andrew Brooks Trail I had no idea that I would be climbing a steep mountain. Through creek bottoms and over grown rocky paths, that almost broke my ankle, I was determined to do some serious thinking so I set out to accomplish my goal. As I started my journey up the mountain I found that thinking about my personal problems wasn’t going to happen. All I could think about was where my foot placement was and how I would cross five feet creek sections with out rolling my ankle or getting wet. As the incline increased I grew exhausted, having to stop and catch my breath more often than not. About 20 minutes into my hike I took a break and talked to a fellow hiker named rob who had been to the top of the trail and assured me to keep going that the view was incredible. He informed me of a lake about 45 minutes up that he had been fishing at but with no luck. When we parted I finally had an idea what awaited me at the top and I was even more determined to reach this lake. As I continued the trail became more and more difficult making me more skeptical if I could finish this goal. Every time I thought of giving up I came across fellow hikers descending the mountain with huge smiles on their faces telling me of the most incredible view at the top. This seemed to give me more ambition and will to continue forward. The trail was marked only by a few blue marks on trees surrounding the trail spaced out sporadically. I found my self thinking of nothing but finding that next blue mark. It was almost a game, once I reached one mark I would frantically search for the next one keeping me focused at the task at hand. One hour into the hike I found myself sweaty surrounded by buzzing mosquitos from the wet conditions but surprisingly excited and happy to keep finding these blue markers. What seemed like an impossible goal at first suddenly seemed to be in reach. As i saw the tree tops started to clear and allow more blue sky to filter through I realized I was almost to the top. Eager to reach my destination I seemed to move more quickly jumping across boulders and rocks. Finally I heard people laughing and shouting and this lake appeared. As I joined and talked to the local hikers I couldn’t help but smile that I finished my goal. It was hard to believe that only a few short hours before this I was depressed and ruling in my own negativity. Now I was on the top of this amazing mountain staring down at small houses and trees that looked to be the size of shrubs and a view that lasted for hundreds of miles. On the way down I felt just like a kid again skipping over rocks looking at at the scenery I was reluctant to see on the way up. This hike taught me a life lesson that is currently helping me through my personal issues at hand. At the bottom this seemed impossible to get over but as i continued up with my head down and people to help me along the way. I found out that no matter how big the issue is if i just set a personal goal to completing it or getting over thee issues I will be successful. It might be a long hard road paved with rocks and other hazards that try to slow me down but as long as I’m determined I can and will get over my issues. That the top or end goal is worth all the pain and hard work I had to endure to reach it. This was one of my favorite accomplishments so far, even though it was off the farm and it will stick with me through out my life. Im gong to start to live my life a little more on the edge and do things I normal wouldn’t do or in the words of Tod “ take more left turns than right” in hopes of living my life to the fullest. In the words of Mark Moran “ You only have one life, so why waste it doing things you don’t enjoy or waste it on people that aren’t worth your time”. Even though the end of the week had some hardships I’m more determined than ever to succeed in my life endeavors not for anyone else but for myself. </p>
<p>-Patrick</p>
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<p>This week was probably the hardest week physically on the farm yet. It seemed like every morning I would wake up and be more tired than the previous morning. No matter how tired I was, I was always excited to see what the next day had in stored. This week was also one of the most productive weeks for the unit as well. Pat finished up the picket fence around the garden, Bubs finished the fence rails on the orchard fence, and Matt spent the week deep cleaning the main house. We finished up numerous projects around the farm and even had time to touch up the farm. On Wednesday and Thursday Pat and I helped a close friend of Marc, named Todd. Pat and I helped demo a dock and carried the pieces out to a dump trailer. We salvaged and saved a lot of lumber that we plan on using to build an addition to the Sugar House, to maintain all the firewood. After we finished up loading all the lumber and dock pieces, we came back to the farm to see Todd holding 2 thirty packs of beer. After several beers and just listening to all the stories that Todd was telling about his younger life. One thing that I distinctly remember Todd telling us before I browned out was, “If you ever get a chance in life take a left instead of a right and see what happens”.</p>
<p>-Willex</p>
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<p>Our second day here, May 31st, we did our morning routine, which consists of feeding the animals, then went on to projects. Two men dug a trench in order to lay water pipe to make easier access to water the cows, while another employee and I dug holes to set fence posts around the garden. This way we can keep the chickens and dogs out of the garden. Our second day here didn’t consist of a lot but we also learned how the farm cooks its own meals and how actually self-sustaining they are. Any
food left over from the meals gets fed to the pigs. Nothing here goes to waste. We even learned that lesson again today.
June first, today, we processed a pig so that we would have something to eat this summer. While processing the pig the owner showed what part of the pig was what and what you could do with the different types of cuts of meat. We learned the whole process from when the animal was alive to when it has had its hide removed, its innards pulled out and head and feet cut off. It is now hanging in the barn in order to let it cure. When it is done curing we will go the process of how to butcher the rest of the pig. I find this whole process interesting. It allows me to see the whole process on how we get our food. I get to see start to end, from the raising of the animal all the way to when it goes in my</p>
<p>-Anthony</p>
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<p>When I read what they’ve written I get a chance to see how the experience of living this life impacts others. So much of what we have done over the last eight years has been done for each other and to provide for our survival as a family that I wonder if it has any kind of value beyond the limits of our property. We are cognizant of the things we do for the animals, for the soil and the water, for the maple orchard and the wood lot, the children and the marriage, but beyond that it is sometimes hard to tell if we aren’t being in some ways selfish about our labor and resources. The things they write tell us a story that makes our concerns seem silly and when we sit down to eat with the young men, or share a joke or two it becomes obvious that we are giving them something back for all of their time and effort.</p>
<p>Last Fall we had a late farrowing and the sow dropped an unusually large number of piglets. There were a couple of runts and somehow I failed to get rid of one of them and allowed it to remain with the litter longer than I should have. because it was so small it figured out how to get out of the enclosure whenever it liked and grazed contentedly in the apple orchard while his litter mates watched from a distance. He didn’t cause much damage and since we had already harvested most of the crops for the year, he would glean from the raised beds, find the errant fruits dropped in the tall grass and suckle on the sow long after the rest had been weened. it was not intentional that we kept him around, but more of an oversight. He became estranged from the rest of the feeders as they grew and acted more as a mascot to the farm, tagging along with the dogs when they’d herd cattle to their pens, resting in the shadows near me whenever I worked on some project around the barn yard. After a while he caught up to the others in size and when I’d try and restore him to the swineherd he would invariably escape confinement having learned to climb fences as he made his way around the farm in the months previous. We gave up on having him become a part of the feeder herd and allowed him to remain with the big boar, an 800 pound giant with a mellow disposition and his own shed and yard. By Spring when we got ready to sell the hogs at market he was finally put back with the rest of his litter and it turned out that the runt had grown to at least a third as large as the others and he had become the dominant boar of the lot. He was so domesticated by his proximity to us that I could open the gate and just let him out to walk along with me every time I went up to the woodlot to cut firewood and he would simply hang out and watch, rooting through the leaf litter looking for mast as if he’d been assigned to the task. He’s since been chosen to replace the old boar and if I hadn’t seen his development with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. I watched an episode of This American Life not long ago where they’d gone to a hog farm in Iowa, the kind where all the pigs live in crates about the size of a broom closet and the only time they move is to the truck that takes them to the slaughterhouse. The farmer who ran that operation said that they’d been tinkering with the genetics of the hogs that would make them less likely to have anxiety so that their shaking and shivering wouldn’t burn unnecessary calories, thereby wasting feed. I noticed that none of them had tails — they’d been docked at birth so that they would bite them out of nervous habit, that the farmer was almost proud of the fact that “they’ve never been out in the sunlight in their lives so their color is nice and pink” and that when tasters were offered bite sized morsels in the research laboratory where the women in hair nets and lab coats cooked the pork on George Foreman grills, they had to flood the room with red light so that they couldn’t see the color of the meat, thereby influencing their opinion (it was gray in real light and quite unappetizing to my eyes). By the time I got to the end of the piece I felt sorry for the farmer, for the pigs he raised, for the people that would eventually eat the pork that came off of that mechanized, industrial agriculture operation. The only part that gave me any hope at all was when the host asked the farmer — who had earlier told him he’d grown up an an old fashioned type farm where the animals were kept outside and his father would feed them by hand every day instead of using automated conveyors and pre-measured feeds delivered in tanker trucks from Monsanto — if he missed the kind of farming his father had done and living on that kind of farm. The face of the farmer registered an instant of reflection, you could almost see him looking back in time to the barnyard where he’d grown up, spending time with his father in the open air, the sounds of the hogs and the sunlight, and then his face fell, his eyes grew sad and his smile vanished and even as he answered you knew he wasn’t lying to the host, but to himself. “No,” he said flatly, “This is the only way to feed people.” And then he recovered. he went on to explain how much science had done to alter the animal, the environment, the feed and the processing so that more people could have better access to more food at a cheaper price and that the way his father had done things was never coming back, as if he had memorized each line.</p>
<p>Today is the Fourth of July and after chores the day is theirs. I offered to show them how to fire a rifle, how to zero a weapon, tear it apart and clean it afterwards and I have a couple of cases of ammo that they can shoot down in the sand pit before they fire up the grill and throw some sausages and burgers on for their nourishment. They’ve come a very long way in a very short time and I am extremely proud of my son for having had the foresight and the skills to influence these young men to come along with him for the Summer to spend it doing something worthwhile for all of us. Every day they learn something new and every night I reflect on how much I didn’t know before, how the lessons we come to understand as we make our way through this life are present in everything we see and touch and taste and experience. We think that we know a great deal about life, or that our skills and our talents are something we’ve accomplished intentionally, but that’s not the case. Life has plans for us and things to tech that we never expect and if just show up and put in our best effort at being open to what the world has to offer, the learning never ends. That much I know.</p>
Tue, 04 Jul 2017 13:00:37 -0500https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/07/04/how-we-learn-what-we-know/
https://hardscrabblefarmer.com/2017/07/04/how-we-learn-what-we-know/